I'm leaving San Francisco next month also. I just see no reason to continue living here. The weather is nice in California, but the city is so mismanaged it's a joke. The homelessness has been an issue for decades now and local politicians always talk about it, but what do they actually do to help? I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros have stepped over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year. Why didn't they build more houses here? Oh, the views would be spoiled! Right. People can continue shitting in the street then. We don't mind that view.
People of San Francisco passed a law t̶o̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶b̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶$̶1̶0̶0̶0̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶p̶s̶.̶ They also expect safe neighborhoods. You can't have both.
Liberal policies such as this does not solve the actual problem. Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps starting an infrastructure program to employ these people and fix the damn roads, they empower the poor to go rampage stores to survive.
> People of San Francisco passed a law to allow any robbery under $1000
That’s just not true at all, come on, you’re intentionally spreading misinformation.
It raised the limit to $950 for the felony threshold for simple theft. Robbery is still a felony.
“Prop 47 doesn’t cover robberies, theft by the use of force or fear. It doesn’t cover burglaries,” Gascón said. “If you break into a structure with the intent to commit theft or another felony, that continues to be a felony. If someone breaks into your car to steal even a pack of cigarettes, that’s still a felony.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-shoplifting-...
Gascon isn't the DA, Boudin is (the son of leftwing activists who convicted of felony murder for killing two policemen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin). With his parents in prison Boudin was adopted by Bill Ayers, another Weather Underground leader who also made headlines for saying (in a video interview - https://daleyeagerdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/breaking-v... reminiscent of Hobsbawm) we might need to kill 25 million Americans if they resist communism and this was an acceptable price to pay to achieve social justice.
Boudin was proud of this heritage and campaigned as having impeccable socialist credentials as the adopted son of Ayers. He went on the record announcing how devastating it was to have parents in jail and vowed to reduce prosecutions. He announced a policy of not prosecuting for property crimes especially if the offenders belong to certain victimhood groups, he fired a number of prosecutors who were responsibile for prosecuting gang crime (https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/01/10/new-san-francis...), and he instituted a policy of pressuring victims of violent crime to not press charges and accept "restorative justice" programs, especially if the offenders were members of victim classes - even for murder. Victims of violent crime report substantial pressure from Boudin's office repeatedly calling and demanding they agree to diversionary programs while victims of property crime are often ignored entirely and police discourage the filing of reports. Despite this, the city now leads the nation in property crime.
Citing quotes by Gascon for a State proposition is not a sufficient characterization for the special brand of lawlessness we have here in San Francisco.
It's beautiful irony that the most capitalist place on earth has Boudin as DA. I don't have anything against him for hs background or the fact that he is proud of it. None of that precludes him from doing a good job. In fact it could indeed be beneficial because he has awareness of issues from a perspective few do. That said the proof is in the pudding and it is unconscionable that the city that is the engine room for creating new wealth suffers from the problems described so often here. What's going on? It makes no sense from the outside. It just looks like a social version of asset stripping.
San Francisco high in property crime but low in arrests:
"San Francisco has by far the highest property crime rate in California, with more than twice the number of reported thefts per capita than Los Angeles or Santa Clara counties, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
And when it comes to arrests, San Francisco is 50th out of the state’s 58 counties."
It’s always a bit problematic to compare SF County to other counties like LA. SF City and County are the same geographical area where, Los Angles City and Los Angeles county are not. LA county includes 60+ suburbs. Santa Clara county has San Jose metro but also 14 suburbs.
Put it this way LA county is 4000 square miles, Santa Clara is 1300. San Francisco is 47. I bet if you target the most urban areas of those counties the numbers get a lot closer.
This. I moved outside of Portland a few months ago
after three serious incidents on my property involving
violent vagrants. In all three cases the police took
over an hour to show up and did absolutely nothing.
I had a man trying to break in to my backdoor. When
I confronted him and demanded that he leave, he began
swinging punches and pulled out a knife. I managed to
restrain him and the 13 year old girl next door called
911 (in hysterics). After keeping this guy pinned
for 30 mins while waiting for the cops, I gave up and
released him. He then attempted to assault me again. So
I pinned him for another 15 mins, the neighbors called
911 again. Still no cops. So I let him go and kept
kicking the guy in the ass (literally) until he left
my property.
The cops show up about 75 minutes after the first
call and said "Our hands are tied. We can't do
anything." They didn't even bother to look for the
guy. They just wanted to leave.
I've seen this happen first hand in developing
countries. You know what happens when law enforcement
doesn't do its job? Violence escalates due to rise of
vigilantism - as communities are left with no choice
other than to employ street justice.
After three incidents (none as bad as the first) I found
myself concluding "The next time one of these guys tries
to break into my property or threaten my family I am
simply going to kick the shit out of them... There is
no point calling the police."
I am a peaceful person that has never even been
in a fight. That's when I knew it was time to leave
Portland. Who wants to live like this? I don't want to
assault anyone, but I also want to live in peace and
feel assured my family is safe.
How would that situation be improved if cops were required to spend time and energy pursuing cases where a kid stole a packet of gum from a convenience store?
The fact that cops aren’t responding to cases of violence has nothing to do with the shoplifting laws passed in SF, and frankly, that law should explicitly open up more resources for cops to be able to investigate such violent behavior.
What exactly in Portland prevents them from acting on violent vagrants. Depending on the timeline, this likely has more to do with the fact that police unions across the country deployed a deliberate don’t do police work policy because people decided to protest against the minority of police that were killing in percent civilians merely because of their skin color of the zip code they were arrested in.
Not pursuing "small" - quoted because up to $950 is rather big chewing gum really - crimes creates wrong incentives, and it skews general culture of (dis)respect to law, and property. Essentially normalizing bad behavior will inevitably affect bigger crimes happening. Taking into account that it especially influences youth (breaking rules is cool enough when you're teenager, if you can shoplift without punishment it starts to look like an invitation) we are witnessing a crime problem growing for a at least a generation ahead.
EDIT: "chewing gun" to "chewing gum". Guns are usually not chewy for certain.
>who convicted of felony murder for killing two policemen
That seems improbable. Why would anyone be charged with felony murder if they killed someone? It seems like a contradiction in terms.
Edit: to be clear, it's easy to look up that yes, his parents were convicted of felony murder, and no, they didn't kill the police officers. That's how felony murder works, so I wonder if the comment above is preaching to people who think "felony" is an intensifier for "murder" or whether it's an honest mistake.
If anything under 950 is a misdemeanor and San Francisco isn't pressing charges on anything that isn't a felony, it's effectively legalized theft. You don't need to rob anyone if you can walk into any store and take whatever you want and the police do nothing about it.
Watch some recent episodes of Soft White Underbelly with homeless people in SF. It will really open your eyes to how much the problem is the cities disinterest in doing anything at all to fix things. All of their 'fixes' are really just enablement.
That's a very high limit for simple theft, so now simple theft is what occurs the most. Why would anyone commit felonies or robberies when they can just walk in and take below that limit without any enforcement or consequence?
Making crime easier to commit doesn't reduce crime.
Theft under the $950 threshold is still a crime, specifically a misdemeanor, which can result in jail time. The whole idea that theft is going totally unpunished is a false narrative.
It's not a false narrative, though what is a false narrative is that it's directly because of prop 47, and not retailers adopting policies directed at limiting employees confronting thieves, resulting in fewer being caught. To the extent prop 47 plays a role, it's because police departments deemphasize followup enforcement on misdemeanors, though there is no legal requirement that they do so: a crime shouldn't need a disproportionate punishment for police to enforce it. And since the same police leaders choosing nonenforcement are also using the increase in crime to lobby for reincreasing punishment, there's an argument that, insofar as Prop 47 is involved, it's because police policymakers are conducting a lobbying campaign by deliberately allowing crime to occur to build support for greater punishment.
Do you seriously think retailers had their employees confronting thieves? This isn't a recent change, they were always instructed to call the police instead of interfering. And if crime isn't being prosecuted then why would police waste limited resources on catching thieves just to see them out on the street with no consequence?
You are looking at this backwards. It's all directly because of policy changes, because that's what changed the judicial behavior, which affected upstream police behavior, which affected upstream public's behavior.
> Do you seriously think retailers had their employees confronting thieves?
Well, since I've known people who worked as loss prevention managers and who did it, and since the news article on the issue posted elsewhere in the thread specifically identified that retailers have changed policies in ways which reduce that, yes, I am reasonably think that they were doing so before and are doing so less now.
> And if crime isn't being prosecuted
To the extent that is a problem in some places (which no source I've seen indicates it is generally, though I've seen some indicating it may be in San Francisco specifically), then that too is not a requirement of the law (misdemeanors are not nonprosecutable) and the same criticism shifts within law enforcement to DAs, it's still not the law’s fault.
So why would retailers change their behavior then? Again you're looking at this backwards. The law changed, so the prosecution changed, so the arrests changed, so the police response changed, and so the retailers (and general public) changed the way they report and deal with crimes.
Why are you placing blame at everything downstream instead of what actually triggered the changes?
The vast majority of nonviolent crimes here now have no police involvement whatsoever. They just have you file an online report for you to forward to your insurance (if any). This includes catalytic converter thefts that can cost over $2000 alone to resolve, let alone other property loss plus vehicle damage.
Police do choose whether and what resources to devote to investigation after a report. If they never identify an offender because they don't do anything with what they are given by retailers, there are no charges to drop.
> The vast majority of nonviolent crimes here now have no police involvement whatsoever.
Police do choose whether and what resources to devote to investigation
... and when the DA publishes a policy directive of non-prosecution of property crime, like in SF, police stop spending resources there. It's a catch-22.
Why is it false? All you stated is the letter of the law, but laws aren't magic. They don't enforce themselves. If crime isn't reported, policed, and prosecuted, then it is -effectively- unpunished.
Can you name a single person in the Bay Area who served even one full day of jail time for a misdemeanor not involving a firearm and/or domestic violence in the past year?
Under the current "zero bail" guidelines, even felony suspects can be put back on the street the same day. Look up Idris Muhammad, who set three fires while already on probation, was quickly released, then set more fires and busted shop windows.
But did that sound correct that they’d allow any robbery? Using that logic, Texas allows any robbery under $2500:
Texas Penal Code § 31.03
(3) a Class A misdemeanor if the value of the property stolen is $750 or more but less than $2,500;
(4) a state jail felony if:
(A) the value of the property stolen is $2,500 or more but less than $30,000, or the property is less than 10 head of sheep, swine, or goats or any part thereof under the value of $30,000;
Texas also has extremely high gun ownership rates, and is one of the few states (maybe the only) that allows the use of deadly force just to protect property.
"There's a good chance you get shot to death" is probably a better deterrent than even a felony, though it's a little morally concerning.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that this is unique to Texas, or that Texas even has the most liberal allowances for use of deadly force. That is definitely not the case.
As a semi-random example, $500 property crime was the threshold for justifiable homicide in Nevada (appears to be $1200 now + a $0 threshold for some classes of property). Criminals knew this and often carefully limited their activity to avoid this threshold, with odd property selection effects.
Hey but the fact that Texas has a higher threshold for property crime to be considered more than a misdemeanor would destroy the “liberals are destroying cities with their soft on crime policies” narrative. Which is literally the only reason anyone originates these claims.
I guess it speaks to the success of right wing media in our society that well educated and well informed people get so badly taken in by them.
Arguably the larger problem is that you (general "you" as in people like you) think this could even be a thing, like you've just completely bought into your biases and didn't do any sort of research on the topic. Your original assertion that robbery under $1000 (or any robbery, really) becoming defacto uncriminalized is so beyond the pale I'm not sure how _anyone_ wouldn't just automatically think they were being mislead or trolled, but somehow your biases or whatever on the subject caused you to not only unquestionably accept such a wild claim, but to repeat it to others.
There's a positive expected value to such positions, specifically espoused on a place like Hacker News. Among venture backed businesses there's affirmative action for that kind of right leaning thinking.
> ...unquestionably accept such a wild claim
For people who don't read or, apparently, Google for five seconds, verisimilitude and truth are the same thing. To be fair, that's true of everyone who doesn't read, not just libertarians.
You're mostly right but 47 didn't even raise the line to $950. It was already $950. What it did do is remove the discretion prosecutors formerly had to use a felony charge for crimes valued at less than $950 for defendants without prior violent felony convictions.
By comparison, the same dividing line in the state of Texas is set at $1500.
Minor correction: in 2014, the people of CA passed Prop 47, which reclassified most non-violent property theft crimes as misdemeanors [0]. This change is largely credited with the dramatic increase in shoplifting in SF.
What’s interesting is why SF appears to be the most affected county. It might be because it continues to elect soft-on-crime City Attorneys or that it fails to investigate organized crime rings that then operate with impunity. My favorite example of this is Fremont PD doing SFPD’s job and busting an international auto theft ring mostly operating in SF[1].
The incarceration rate of SF county is higher than any country or major city in Europe. Persecution ain’t the issue. Lack of housing, healthcare and honourable work is.
Even if you released every prisoner in America, besides the rapists and murderers, the US would still have a higher incarceration rate than Europe. I'm sure the SF specific numbers would tell a similar story.
You can't simply compare European to American incarceration statistics without taking into account that the US is an extremely criminal country for the developed world. And no, this doesn't have to do with universal healthcare or any other hobby horse. America had much higher homicide rates going back to the 18th century, well before modern European welfare states. (Not just the US, the Western Hemisphere in general has always had much higher rates of violent crime.)
The fact of the matter is that we're a violent society. Absent total abolition of prison, we're always gong to have much higher incarceration rates than Europe.
As a counterargument to the claim that Europe is less violent than the United States, especially over a historical period going back to the 18th century: Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process than the total number of murders in the United States for the entire 20th century.
This is putting the US into a worse spotlight than you think.
If it's possible for a mass murdering nation to become more peaceful than the US then that implies that the US completely failed at dealing with violence. Since you are starting off from a much lower base it should be much easier for your country to take care of the problem.
Edit: As other countries pointed out the US did commit war crimes as well.
There is a case to be made that war is just legalised murder, but nevertheless in these comparisons the context does not normally include war.
And would you really want to? The US is far from innocent with its use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing Japan (Truman: "there were more people killed by fire-bombs in Tokyo than dropping the atomic bombs"), Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on.
Note that I'm not saying you're wrong about Nazi Germany, just that, the whilst the death tolls may be either swift or cumulative, it remains the case that all countries are guilty on the war front.
So to repeat: the context is criminality not war, where the distinction is the normally accepted delineation of the two.
> Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
Notice the use of the word "murdered" in the second sentence of the article, as well as throughout the rest.
The context was violence, not criminality. But even if it were criminality, the Holocaust is widely considered a crime against humanity.
Maybe you never intended to, but your comment reads:
> Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process
Reference to Nazi Germany does not, as you say, necessarily equate to war. However "a single named process" would to most readers be treated as narrowing it down to "a single named process" - World War Two.
The most obvious simple reading of your comment would give the clear impression you meant the war. If that wasn't the intention, if the named process was the wider genocide, or simply the Third Reich, then fair enough. But I'm sure you can understand any misreading.
Incarceration rate is an invalid indicator. You need to look at the crime rate, the release rate, and the rehabilitation rate.
There are cycles of poverty and culture causing this but the government’s actions turn SF into both a honeypot and an accelerant for crime. It does this by turning a blind eye to crime both in talk and action.
Criminals know that SF is a great place to commit crime. This draws them in from all over and they commit more crime.
The DA is selling the narrative of rehabilitation but the criminals are just taking advantage of it to just commit more crime.
People think overlooking petty crimes should be the norm, but they're ignorant to the long term impacts and complain when their cities turn into Gotham City without Batman.
Cities cut overall violent crime rates significantly in past decades by applying logic from the broken windows theory[1]. The real reason this works is bc a significant amount of crime is carried out by a very small number of individuals...and enforcing more penalties increases the chances police will scoop up a portion of those individuals. The unfortunate downside of this strategy is that some people (that aren't in that category) face overly harsh consequences in relation to their crime. New versions of this should be tried to try and minimize that from happening.
It should be expected that taking the complete opposite approach would likely lead to much more than a slight increase in petty crimes. Buy hey it sounds good initially and wins votes on the left so why wouldn't they
I wish I believed giving the homeless jobs would fix the problem but I watched my dad who owns a business try and help several local homeless or down on their luck types and more often than not they just take advantage of people then go right back to drugs or worse they have mental health issues and probably will never be able to function in society.
If someone is addicted to drugs they don't get to just stop doing drugs without a lot of work on their part and usually a lot of outside help. If someone has addiction issues you can't just give them a job offer and assume all their problems are solved. No matter how thankful or earnest they are in moments of sobriety their addiction tends to have an overwhelming hold over their behavior.
Addiction is not just an idle habit you kick with some perseverance and self control.
"I tried to help some cancer patients by giving them jobs and the occasional free meal, but a lot of them just ended up dying of cancer anyways."
The day America stops treating addiction as an individual moral failing and starts treating it as a lifelong disease and a collective social failing is the day we finally start to address these issues.
They day we start dealing with it is the day when your kids are addicted. Until then, it’s not our problem.
I’m not sure which drug it’s going to be. Maybe Adderral or Vyvanse being gateway into higher dose amphetamines, or something, but it’s gonna have to be a common drug amongst most of the kids before we take addiction seriously.
Even when it's people's kids they as often as not don't take their addiction seriously. With families there's a lot of enabling and co-dependence that occurs. That's in addition to the views that addition is some moral failing or idle habit.
I think issues around not taking addiction seriously or not understanding it are facets of us collectively not taking mental health seriously.
Ask anyone who tried to quit smoking, how hard was it? It's difficult because of chemical dependencies. You need to get the body used to a lower dosage over time and incrementally lower the dosage. That's the only way you can make it work. It's possible thanks to vaping. It would work most likely work with other drugs like heroin.
> Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps starting an infrastructure program to employ these people and fix the damn roads, they empower the poor to go rampage stores to survive.
We spend over a billion a year on the homeless. It’s an intractable problem, and the weather, social services, and accepting (of panhandling) population drives demand to locate here.
Yes it's intractable because having homeless people is considered more desirable than actually solving the underlying problems because it would hurt special interests.
The average SF resident loves having homeless people because of the secondary benefits that homelessness brings.
Can’t tell if sarcastic or not. People literally do love the secondary benefit of saying they help the homeless, and politicians basically run on that. Obviously the parent comment saying demand is created was talking about homeless demand to travel to an area with better benefits and/or lesser enforcement of laws that homeless would break, like camping on sidewalks and using the world as the toilet.
I witnessed a theft last week where a fellow just walked out with a load of merchandise whilst paying customers counted their coins. The initial social response among the bystanders and customers was alarm. "What just happened!?" Employees responded: "Let it go, it happens all the time."
The impact on the "social bond" of society became suddenly clarified. We live in a lawless society. Those that follow the laws are fools pantomiming a voided social contract in outdated custom.
Shoplifting is tough because it can often be cheaper for the store to write it off than to sufficiently improve security. I think a misdemeanor for theft is fine, but I agree that these laws should be enforced.
It's unlikely that a shop would seek enforcement if it could result in a violent altercation and scare away customers. Likewise police are more likely to expect violence if they are only called in dire emergencies.
A friend worked at a Macy's in Nevada for a few years. Staff were told that shoplifters should be assumed to be armed, and that security would not normally confront them. Staff would often stand by and let shoplifters walk out the door with big hauls of stuff. Large daily losses to theft were just budgeted for.
The "social contract" doesn't serve those in poverty. What's there to lose? Freedom in exchange for three squares and a dry bed? The "law and order" approach sounds great if you're inclined to authoritarianism, but with the largest (absolute and per capita) prison population in the world, what's to show for it? We're a "Christian nation" when that means banning abortion and homosexuality or torturing Muslims, but Jesus would be appalled at how we approach charity, poverty, and forgiveness.
> Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps starting an infrastructure program to employ these people and fix the damn roads, they empower the poor to go rampage stores to survive.
Why not both?
"In 2013, the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 a year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]
The author quoted above makes an excellent case – multiple times – for reducing cost to society if we'd just spend the money to get people off the street in a chapter titled, Criminalizing Homelessness. Think of the number of hours spent by police responding to calls related to homelessness and what social ills it creates. Consider that there are functional individuals who want to contribute to society, but medical bills or a run of bad luck has created circumstances under which this is impossible. Getting those people back into the economy could be useful.
I'm not saying this addresses other issues, such as mental illness. There's quite a lot of services that would be needed there, as well. Also, job training, etc. Another chapter, We Called for Help, and They Killed My Son, deals with the first part.
There's also the problem of addiction among the unhoused. There's a chapter on that as well. I've spot-checked info in the book a number of times and found the information to be well researched. According to the chapter, The War on Drugs, what we've been doing to combat drug use is an even more colossal failure and cash sink than probably most of us realize (assuming that you already think it's a failure).
The book has me convinced that it's cheaper for society, overall, to just pay to help people rather than funding the punitive system that's currently in place.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale pg 97
^^ This book is excellent. I've already bought copies for three people who are close to me who I think will be open to its message.
the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000.
Sure, but that doesn't count spending on emergency room treatment and jail time in addition to the cost of the apartment. Housing didn't stop the other resource consumption or criminal activity.
It also doesn't count the other costs of providing that housing in the first place. The current debate in Mountain View of turning over one hotel to unhoused people includes spending $70,000 per room just in construction/conversion costs for a nice hotel that's barely 30 years old.
This works on a micro scale or closed system but that is not what happens when providing more resources causes people to migrate to your area to take advantage of the resources without ever needing to be contributing to them. A population will simply be over run by those desiring the free housing and this is obvious is any program created like this to tackle the issue. They always run out of room for these high demand resources and eventually cities may have taken care of the homeless problem for the people it meant to, but thousands of new people show up. If it were that easy as just providing housing and the problem was fixed then poverty across the whole world would be eliminated. Not saying that’s not possible, but you would literally have to do that across the entire world or in an entire closed system to make it work.
Yeah, but we throw a really nice gay pride parade to show we're good people. Loads of BLM support on walls. Many of my colleagues updated their instagram filters.
I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked what I've done in my career to support diversity. I told him a story about how a company I was at had decided to outsource some of the QA work to India and when the first employee in India came to the US to onboard I was very welcoming and did everything I could to help him feel welcome and part of the team including hanging out after work.
This HR guy said "Is that really diversity though?"
I guess he was looking for a more symbolic or virtue signaling example and with another minority group other than Indians. Something like "I was the first person at my company to put a BLM sticker on my cube."
"By relocating our manufacturing facility to China and laying off the corresponding employees domestically we have been able to vastly improve workforce diversity numbers".
East Asians aren’t white enough to be invited to the tee time and they’re not diverse enough to get special quotas so they keep doing what they have always done which is study harder and perform better.
I don't think it's symbolic or virtue signalling. In the SF area, "diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female". (You'll often see people say things like "we'd like 40% of our candidate pool to be diverse", which only really make sense under that definition.) The idea of building a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life is usually referred to as "inclusion".
No, it's not symbolic, just the opposite, it's Orwellian newspeak/totalitarianism.
By your very own words: ""diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female"", i.e. a completely subjective, odd, and contextual local moralism.
The problem is that these folks believe that any 'questioning' of their methods or approach are in fact 'questioning' of the underlying positive impetus of their motivation (i.e. we all agree 'not being racist' is good, but that doesn't mean we have to buy into any specific moralisms about diversity).
But anyone who asks that kind of question in an interview is either a clown or a pill-swallowing victim, and it's definitely a massive 'Red Flag' in that you're entering into a dystopian social nightmare where you'll need special help 'interpreting' thew Newspeak.
People from outside the West are already having enough trouble keeping up with the basic PC stuff, this is getting ridiculous.
It's a sign of social decay, and that SF has 'peaked' in terms of it's relative importance. Thanks to COVID, the rise of China, Trumpian foreign policy which has engendered a lot of mistrust, the 'decentralization' has begun in earnest.
I work with developers in E. Europe and 20 years ago they would have jumped at the chance to move to the US, now they have a strong preference for staying home - the only motivation is money, but since there's massive Purchase Power differential, even their low salaries offer them fairly high standard of living - and their economies are growing consistently 4-7%/year.
The story really is not about 'people leaving SF' - it's about 'The End of Short-lived SF Mecca'.
Note that SF proper was not a 'centre' of anything really until about 2010: Google, FB etc. are all 'Valley'companies, not until the rise of Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe did we see 'SF Values' come to start to infiltrate the definition of 'Silicon Valley'. The Bay will remain important, possibly even the 'most' important, but much like broad relative US decline (i.e. 40% of global GDP in 1960, 25% today), the relative influence will wane. The 2010's were 'peak SF'.
Edit: I should add - a regular from outside the Angloshpere upon hearing the question 'what have you done to support diversity' would basically be baffled and probably have no real idea what the interviewer was asking. I don't think many Americans in these situations realize how hyper-American (at very least Anglo/American or Western) these kinds of things are. Imagine asking that question of someone from Hong Kong, Delhi, or god forbid the true capital of 'complicated diversity', Lebanon.
The HR guy was probably looking for an answer that wasn’t “we hired this nonwhite person specifically because he was cheaper than someone in the United States.”
The thing is, as San Franciscans, we really support all the oppressed transgender teenagers in Mississippi. What's that? Build more housing, so they can actually afford to move here and escape the oppression they face in Mississippi? Uh, no, you see, we support them to the extent that it doesn't affect our property values...
I'm saying I also dislike the overly leftist culture in San Francisco, which is another reason why I'm leaving. There are many nice people here, but there are also too many people who I consider too far gone.
Stuff like:
– Non-ironically comparing Trump to Hitler. "At least Hitler listened to his generals!" Umm what? Seriously? And it's not even true: Hitler rarely did. Just... I can't even.
– We can't use the words "blacklist" and "whitelist" now even though they have nothing to do with race. I kid you not, I even heard people talking about "black hole" being "problematic". How patronizing can you be to black people, to think they give a shit? To think this shit is actually helping?
– Non-ironically talking about abolishing the police. If you disagree, you're white privileged and subconsciously racist. No? I just want some statistics first. Evidence it might be a good idea? Pros and cons of the police first? Just not viral videos and emotions?
– Non-ironically talking about socialism, white patriarchy this, equal outcomes that. Partitioning based on race.
– Can't mention Joe Rogan without someone wanting to deplatform, talking about how harmful it is to trans people to even mention the name.
You know what sucks the most? I rarely feel able even to discuss these topics in a calm, sensible way with people. Definitely never at work. Many people are just too emotional here. The culture sucks. So I just keep silent most of the time. You have to figure out if it's safe to say moderate things to someone, like you're in the French resistance or something. And I have relatively liberal views on most topics! I'm hardly an unreasonable right wing gun loving Christian, or whatever caricature of "the other" is in their heads. Yet I don't feel welcome here.
Yeah, go ahead and downvote because I have different politics to you, even though I was just answering the question (at least I interpreted it as a question asking me to elaborate).
The misinformation about Prop. 47 is stunning to me. It did not change anything relating to violent crime, nor did it make petty theft legal. Petty theft is still punishable by jail time. Robbery is still a felony.
What it actually did is raise the line between misdemeanor and felony theft from $450 to $950.
I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that shows Prop 47 has led to higher crime rates. In fact there are many studies which show there isn't any, while at the same time the state is saving tons of money not incarcerating non-violent offenders.
I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that Chesa Boudin has led to higher crime rates, though I'm not sure how controlled the comparison is of pandemic-city levels vs normal crime levels.
Crime happened before prop 47, crime happened after prop 47. Crime happened before Chesa was elected DA, crime happened after he was elected DA.
I wish there were no crime, but to point out an example of one crime being committed and then jumping to broad conclusions, while also misrepresenting the supposed rationale for the increase in crime, it's a bit of a red flag for me.
The consensus on there not being an increase in the crime rate is that police are no longer responding to crimes...so there is no increase in the statistics of criminality...
You can actually, but you need to provide enough basic services so that people in desperate situations have free, healthy, and convenient food, housing, medical care, and education.
Yes, San Francisco is lagging cities in Texas in providing social services, which is why its homelesssness/street-disorder/drug-abuse problem is so much worse.
There is a point at which you have to realize/admit that your ideological narrative, and the public sector interests who popularize it, are wrong. The left coast cities, from San Fran to Vancouver, have prioritized decriminalization of drugs, social services, and hands off policing for 'minor' crimes like theft, and have been overtaken by deliquency and squalor as a result.
As someone whos nowhere near liberal enough to want to live in San Francisco, isn't there some kind of diminishing return effect where the better you're homeless services are, the more homeless come to take advantage, and the worse the problem becomes? Especially with the fantastic weather so less exposure deaths? If Texas spends no money on homeless people who don't help themselves they have to leave or die. What's the ratio of Texas homeless that have been in Texas their whole lives vs San Francisco homeless who have been in California their whole lives?
I don't know all the stats, but I know Waco, TX has a large homeless population since I helped out a bit there when I was younger. A quick search shows that Waco spends $39,000/yr per homeless individual[0], and the famous Church Under the Bridge[1] (an open-air gathering under the I-35 overpass) has been unable to meet normally but is making sure that people still get fed [2]. (They are mention feeding 80 people--there were hundreds when I attended, but there are a number of kitchens around so it sounds like most attendees are getting their food elsewhere).
I don't know why anyone would assume that homeless people are starving in Texas. What do you think all the shelters and kitchens are for?
If you have better services, you attract more potential workers to your city. If you provide resources to educate them, you grow GDP. If you treat people like trash, then you get a bizarre dystopian landscape.
San Francisco is lagging cities in Texas because Texas actually has seasons and would rather not have a bunch of rotting corpses under their many overpasses.
SF is over 5x denser than Dallas, which is the densest major city in Texas. The problem with homelessness is people can't afford to live in homes. It is a lot easier to avoid homelessness when you have essentially endless space to build housing.
I certainly can't afford to live on Madison Ave in NYC. But instead of living in a tent on the street on Madison Ave, I live in a city that is much cheaper than NYC and I don't live in the most expensive part of town.
Should NYC provide me housing if I start living in a tent on Madison Ave?
As another commenter linked to, they should and will. (SF, in contrast, will not - homeless advocacy groups in California generally aren't fans of shelters, so there's not much pressure to ensure there are enough beds to go around.)
That isn't a credible argument. We've known how to engineer for seismic risks for a very long time and many dense, tall cities are built on top of faults in seismic risk zones at least as severe as San Francisco without issue.
For example, Tokyo and Seattle. San Francisco even has the advantage of being merely fault adjacent. In cases like Seattle, a major thrust fault runs through the city. It doesn't prevent dense construction.
SF has additional earthquake protection laws that kick for buildings taller than 8 or 9 stories iirc. I think they're expensive to do, because a lot of buildings stop at that height.
SF is the size of downtown Houston, and Houston does not have these problems.
Applying statistics from SF, which is effectively the "downtown" of the Bay Area is not a valid comparison. The population density of San Francisco is not impressive, period. Downtown Houston is much more developed than San Francisco, and that would be a more valid comparison for density.
But this also doesn't get to the main point which was cost and housing density. Cost per sq/ft in Houston (excluding the lots, which are enormous compared to the Bay Area) is $107. Median house price in downtown Houston is $310K.
Costs per sq/ft in the Bay Area are anywhere between $280 and $800. It's not a close comparison in price at all, despite being a comparable density.
On an absolute basis, SF has horrifically restricted housing policy that makes it incredibly difficult to build new, denser housing. However, compared to the broader bay area, SF has incredibly progressive housing policy.
It is ridiculous to compare downtown Houston, which is surrounded on all sides by a zillion square miles of suburbs (under city control!), to SF, which is surrounded by a limited number of more expensive and more restrictive enclaves that SF has no power over, and most of those places are a bridge or tunnel away. Obviously there is going to be less demand, and less premium for land if there are 10,000 other plots within 30 minutes. That just isn't the case in SF.
If the bay area as a whole had better housing policy than it would help SF a lot. But they don't, so it makes it worse for SF. And SF has no control over the housing laws passed in other counties. SF is of course partially at fault, as they should have better housing policy themselves, but they are not entirely responsible for the problem.
According to Google, downtown Houston is 1.84 square miles. Houston is 669 square miles. So downtown Houston represents about 0.3% of Houston. The reason it is affordable in downtown Houston is because the other 99.7% of Houston exists, and if it weren't affordable in downtown people would just live elsewhere.
You don't have the same choices in and around SF, therefore there is a lot of demand on much smaller amounts of land, therefore it's a lot more expensive!
It's the same reason rent is really expensive in NYC, even though they are way more dense than SF. Lots of demand, not many alternatives.
And yet rents remain sky high in those same cities, despite the pandemic shuttering workplaces and slowing local economies, because lots of people still really want to live in them. There is a point at which you have to realize/admit that your ideological narrative, and the interests who popularize it, are wrong.
The thing is businesses can not rebuild and move buildings quickly. When jobs disappear rents will go down. It seems impossible San Francisco could be the next Detroit but it’s actually not that improbable. There is just so much inertia keeping businesses from being able to move that they can’t or won’t. The actually physical cost to spent billions to build a headquarters but also the need to be closely located to other businesses that you will work with. Without this inertia you would see much more businesses leaving than are now, and there are more than ever leaving.
We left about 9 months ago. I'm not going to pontificate and judge people. From our point of view, the policies seemed to be designed to incentivize us to leave, so we left. We'll miss SF, but we were never welcome.
>> Despite suggestions of a California exodus to other states in recent months, most who leave that region do not move far
<<
Right. I left CA to Vegas and it’s like every second car on a stoplight has CA license plates. Houses in decent areas are overbidding.
What Covid didn’t do - liberal policies finished. SF flooding with feces, rising crime, exorbitant taxes and lockdown nonsense.
The way San Francisco is managed finally made sense to me (in a bad way) once I learned about the Second Great Migration and the fact that there was basically no black population here until World War 2. Making the cost of living as expensive as possible is a wonderfully deniable way to drive out people who have been repeatedly denied the ability to build generational wealth: https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...
I've thought this for a while: NIMBYism and other anti-development policies is how liberals implement "red lining" with plausible deniability... even to themselves. They're not trying to exclude the poor and minorities. They're trying to protect the environment! Never mind that these policies encourage sprawl and waste.
It's more than that- dodd frank made financing for building spec houses/housing next to impossible unless participating in a hud or similar program. These policies result in the exact opposite of what you would want to build class mobility/ American Dream/ generational wealth: more rentals (without lowering rental costs, since govt guarantees a min return), less home ownership, and a higher barrier to invest in the housing market.
What?! Dodd-Frank had nothing to do with it. The housing price crash allowed institutional buyers to make a new asset class out of SFR. They bought hundreds of thousands of houses. They aggressively increase rents because they’re levered and their returns come from rent increases. This has caused rents in the rest of America to sky rocket. Not only do they vacuum up inventory, they never sell it. This hurts would be homeowners two ways.
It used to be that SFR was all small funds or investors. These investors hold fixed 30 year notes and don’t have to be aggressive with rent increases. A turn is more of a concern than a rent increase.
Dodd- Frank had nothing to do with that. The fix is to require these institutional funds to liquidate to owner-occupants after a decade. Let them cash out the appreciation and wind up the fund.
> I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go.
I worked on a public project. The funds were misappropriated in my opinion. Your tax dollars are wasted like in every other state. Therefore: lower taxes.
It's more sarcasm than not. He's saying it was never a desirable area but tech companies moved there anyway despite theoretically having the money to be nicer places.
Intelligence is having knowledge (think book knowledge )
Bright is like sharp. (think street smart or think things through that are complexed)
I have friends that I consider very intelligent that are not bright. One makes $200k as an actuary but can't figure out how to talk to his kids in a way that sounds human/normal.
Last I checked, California cost per inmate was more than double the national average. Interestingly, from what I remember, 20 years ago the same cost in California was about national average.
California should investigate contracting the prison service to Oklahoma: Oklahoma spends per prisoner something like a quarter of California spends, so California could save lots of money this way, and Oklahoma would make a lot of money, a great example of positive sum trade.
Of course, that’s not going to happen, because California rulers don’t want to incarcerate all these people, and from this perspective, high cost is a feature, not a bug: it helps in arguing against incarceration.
>"Most who left San Francisco stayed in the Bay Area economic region, according to the study, and some 80% remained in the stateMost who left San Francisco stayed in the Bay Area economic region, according to the study, and some 80% remained in the state"
I'm curious where you fall on the exodus spectrum? Are you leaving California or just SF? Where did you decide to relocate to?
It's puzzling to me that NIMBYism seems so common among people who identify as liberal. It's clearly just another way of kicking away the ladder and is inherently with the stated goals of liberalism. At least neo-liberals seems to have gotten this one 100% correct.
NIMBYism isn't congruent with liberalism. Liberalism is an anti-authoritarian, market philosophy. NIMBYism is about leveraging authoritarian policy to dictate what others can do. If housing in SF were left to market forces, there would be a completely set of different problems...but NIMBYism wouldn't be one of them.
Why would this be puzzling? Liberals support diversity until the rubber meets the road and they have to live near diverse sets of people. That's why they vehemently vote in favor of NIMBY policies.
What I notice in Berlin is a conflation between NIMBYism and desire to solve problems with good planning and not just filling in every yard in the city so no apartments get sunlight anymore.
What you need is simple incremental growth. Let people decide what they need instead of dictating what they need. This means increasing the number of available options. If there is a way to increase options while retaining things like sunlight then you should do that.
The incremental growth ship sailed 15 years ago. They need to zone with the intention to knock down badly built old buildings and build 3+ number of floors there instead.
I'm wondering what you think of the idea that the people we call "liberal" in this country aren't really all that "leftist" - they're just more left than our "conservatives". This is especially true for economic beliefs, I find. Like, ask an Italian communist (they still exist!) whether Joe Biden is a leftist and he'll choke from laughter on his ravioli. And after all, Barack Obama's world leader bff wasn't some Green Party guy in Bolivia or something - it was Angela Merkel.
I came around to this some time ago and I'm always curious if it makes sense to others.
This is what happens when several orthogonal concepts are distilled into two categories. Nobody actually knows what left or right actually mean. Originally it was just about economic policy, left being larger government, right being smaller (no party was extreme because that's insane). Now right can also mean authoritarian or racist. To many it's simply left=good, right=bad.
It was never originally about economic policy, you've got them mixed up. Right was originally about support of the French King, authoritarianism, conservatism. Left was in support of the French Revolution, liberalism.
The terms have lost all meaning in contemporary American discourse. “Socialist”, “liberal”, “leftist”, “progressive” are just used either as a pejorative or arbitrary categorical unrelated to any prior representation.
To a “progressive”, “liberal” is a pejorative. To a “liberal”, “leftists” are the enemy. To “the right”, all 4 words mean the same thing and are interchangeable in usage.
Unfortunately this is true. The two-party system is removing all nuance from arguments, forces everything into one of two boxes and it's dividing the country. The number one issue to solve is election reform. We desperately need an election system that's not extremely prone to the spoiler effect. If we don't get this, politics will only become more of a shit show or worse we might see more violence. It's encouraging to see that places like Fargo and Saint Louis have success in adopting STAR voting.
Conservative cities? There isn’t a lot of data, just small cities like Fairbanks and Colorado Springs as well as big city suburbs like Mesa (suburb of Phoenix).
Enforcing quality of life laws. It doesn't even have to be a conservative city. Both Boston and Miami look like first world cities compared to SF and LA.
> Where do you propose all these new houses be built?
That's your problem right there, when you write "houses". Cities need apartment buildings, which allow more homes per same area than single family houses.
Let builders tear down old buildings and single dwelling house and build up and denser. NIMBYism prevents this currently because people want to "keep the feel" of the area. Well that's impossible. Things always change, you can't go back, you can only delay and price yourself out of your own house. At least most get to sell at a good profit.
"Allowing new housing to be built to satisfy demand."
No they don't.
Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build.
The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there.
Vancouver 'built built built' and didn't make a dent in affordability - just the opposite, it's one of the most unnafordable places on earth.
>Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build.
It doesn't matter what gets built, just that it gets built and that everyone gets a place to live in.
>The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there.
If its a population destination and the rest of the country isn't then why would we tell people that they shouldn't come here? What about all those poor people who wouldn't be poor in SF?
>Vancouver 'built built built' and didn't make a dent in affordability - just the opposite, it's one of the most unnafordable places on earth.
Pretty much everyone I have heard talk about Vancouer is that Vancouver failed to build enough housing.
"It doesn't matter what gets built, just that it gets built and that everyone gets a place to live in"
This makes no sense.
? People who live in SF (or any community) are already housed in SF. 'Everyone' already has a place to live.
Unless by 'everyone' you mean 'everyone who wants to live there', which is absurd, because if cost were not part of the equation probably 50x the number of people in SF would not mind being there.
That's why we have suppl and demand.
"why would we tell people that they shouldn't come here? "
This is really baffling. You do realize that if SF when from 600K people to 5M people (vertical, like HK or Vancouver) that it would be a completely different kind of city, and wouldn't resemble the current SF in any way?
Nobody has a right to live anywhere.
Every community has a right to influence the future of their own community.
If SF residents want to 'go vertical' that's fine, if they don't that's fine as well.
"Pretty much everyone I have heard talk about Vancouer is that Vancouver failed to build enough housing."
'Hearsay' (i.e. some random people said some stuff about an issue) does not help your argument.
The facts are 1) Vancouver built out massively. You can see the city skyline has been totally transformed and 2) it's still completely unnafordable.
Why is it unnafordable? Because of demand from foreign places and ultra low interest rates. Local salaries are not enough to supply that kind of demand. A lot of people moving in from foreign places (or just buying). For a variety of reasons.
As a 'global safe zone' the demand is massive, far more so than the locals can endure.
In this specific case, the problem is not 'build more' - the problem is 'don't allow foreign ownership', 'get interest rates under control' and 'reduce migration to normal levels' (Canada always has higher than normal migration, that's fine, but the amounts set lately are massive and most migrants prefer cities, putting additional pressures).
To say that Vancouver built built built requires an ignorance of historical building rates. Vancouver, like the American west coast cities, severely underbuilt for decades and only recently returned to historical average rate of home building, which does not help address the accumulated deficit. For example in 2009 the whole city only built 9000 new homes, which is 1/3rd the average historical per-capita rate.
A community can house as many people as it houses - and that's that.
There can be an 'amount of new development relative to other places' - but not without a massive dose of 'housing ideology' can you say how much is over or under.
Second, the notion that 'there was less building for decades and then a lot of building, but not enough to catch up' doesn't really make sense, because even with an ideological view of 'how much is correct' there can be no such thing as 'pent up unfulfilled demand from previous building'. There are not a bunch of people living in Calgary or Seattle 'waiting' for the opportunity if only affordability was there.
Plenty of places in the world are 'more expensive' than neighbouring regions and yet don't 'build out quickly'.
Lastly, and most importantly, Vancouver has built up quite dramatically over the last two decades, and even as it has done this, affordability has plummeted.
The problem with 'NIMBYism and Housing' is the degree to which that position is ideological and that people don't recognize it as such.
There is no such thing as 'over/under' building for any specific community, there is only such a thing relative to net demand in nation for example that is either growing or shrinking for natural reasons or migration.
??? Life expectancy, birth rates, net migration are the factors of an overall nation, not not of any city.
Nobody has been able to put forth a single reasonable argument for why SF must tear down their homes and put up apartment buildings other that 'because it should'.
And FYI there is no housing shortage in the US overall, there never has been, housing has expanded commensurate with population.
Not only that - housing is relatively cheap in the US.
Of course there is a lot of demand to live in SF vis-a-vis Sacramento, there always will be, but otherwise, there isn't any reason to build a single home unless the residents want that.
I guess we’re just going to disagree there. In my view it is completely immoral to give birth to people but not build them a place to live. It is as immoral as suggesting that people should leave their city upon retirement, and for the same reason.
"It is completely immoral to give birth to people but not build them a place to live."
If you mean to say 'people have a moral right to live in the city they were born in' - fair enough - but this notion falls apart instantly unless you want to somehow give 'born and raised SF' kids some kind of literal non-market advantage.
If you live in an 'expensive place' then your kids can live there, as long as they are wealthy enough, that's the cost of living in a wealthy place and there's no way around it.
By 'building more to facilitate affordability' - well that certainly would enable more people to live there, but the demand will come from all over not just 'the kids of'.
SF is a small city and it's expensive, if parents want their kids to live there they can literally give them their homes. Otherwise, their kids can get good jobs or live in Santa Rosa.
There is plenty of space in North Cal.
Finally, SF residents can make up their own minds about how they want to do it. More building, less building, it's entirely up to them and nobody else's business.
In my limited experience, they're just far less kind. They won't hesitate to arrest you, and if they do, they'll throw away all the stuff you had collected and take your dog to the pound if you had one. Police won't help if you call, and if someone else calls about you then you are presumed guilty.
The end result is that the homeless either end up leaving, or moving their camp to somewhere out of the way like the woods. If you're an eye sore, people will call 911 on you 15 times a day.
I'm not advocating for it, but "let's make the homeless in our city so miserable they don't want to be seen" seems to be effective in reducing the eye sore.
What people call "homelessness", are different (yet overlapping) problems that can be mitigated separately:
1) Public urination / defecation: There is a need for more public bathrooms. That's cheaper than spending millions of dollars cleaning poop and urine from the streets.
2) Public intoxication and substance abuse: Decriminalizing drugs and letting people get as intoxicated as they want is not a responsible approach. The responsible approach would be to treat drug addiction as a health problem. That means, prescribing medications to help the addicts manage the reasons behind their addiction (anxiety, depression, PTSD and other conditions), their addiction, and making sure they do not overdose.
3) Littering: sentence people to do community service cleaning the litter.
4) Homelessness: Many homeless people do not want to comply with shelter rules, so they live in the streets. The shelters won't allow intoxication, drugs, etc.
I support opening up more public restrooms but those are extremely expensive to maintain and secure in areas with large homeless populations. People use them for drug dealing and prostitution, and vandalism is constant.
My wife and I used to enjoy going into SF for shopping, dinner, Opera or a show. It has become a shit hole and even before the pandemic we just stop going. To be clear I feel a great deal of sympathy for the homeless population and I believe the policies of the local government as well as the failure of our mental health system are the cause. Providing housing and mental health support would really help.
> "I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros have stepped over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year"
Tokyo is the biggest city in the world. 10x the population of SF. Not that many homeless addicts lying around, and the average skilled worker doesn't make that much. I can name you 50 cities bigger than SF that don't have this problem.
So it seems the correlation between population size and 'rich people literally stepping over needled addicts' is not that strong.
Right, but isn't that exactly the irony, or at least the hypocrisy? That people with the most liberal sensitivities seem willing to accept this level of visible human suffering for whatever personal benefits they get from living there?
People will stereotype Texans as rugged individualists ready to shoot you for stealing from a fruit stand, or Chinese as some heartless mass that will run you over and go about their day. But I don't see any cities in those places with such visible social problems.
Those drinking the SF Kool-Aid will tell you it's because of the weather being a magnet for homeless people, or some other such nonsense. As if nowhere else in the world keeps temps above freezing year round.
> I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros step over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year
Why's that ironic? Isn't that exactly liberalism? Accepting and tolerating different people behaving in different ways and not forcing them to change? Individual rights and responsibilities, limited government intervention, freedom of way of living, rejecting authoritarianism and the nanny state?
I feel like tons of people don't know what the word 'liberalism' means.
It’s pretty fascinating how in a country “by of, for the people” they’ve chosen to sit on social media, complain about wanting freedom from social ills, but also the freedom to optimize their time to avoid dealing with it.
Y’all want to disrupt something? Extreme ownership models really seem like the last social structure to disrupt.
My knowledge of SF zoning and housing problems is quite limited, but how in your opinion building new residential property will help the problem of homelessness and drug abusing? For homeless and drug abusers to be able to afford housing, prices must fall by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Cities are more efficient and sustainable. Most importantly, cities bring people together to enable cooperation, therefore acting as a multiplier on what is produced and generally making humanity better off.
The connection to nature one finds residing in the countryside is pretty much impossible to replicate while living in a city. Wildlife diversity, fresh air, ability to grow and harvest a garden - all of these are much more accessible outside a city and I believe lead to much more wholesome human experience. The concrete and glass of a modern metropolis do not make me feel like humanity is “better off”. Just my two cents though
I don’t disagree with you. I am an avid backpacker and really enjoy nature. Many studies show people have better mental attitudes when they can view trees daily, etc.
I’ll just note that there are a lot of different points on the spectrum between country side and concrete/glass metropolis. Many of these points are great places I would still count as cities, and they still allow for gardens. I am NOT arguing for us all to live in high rises in midtown Manhattan. I do think that we should build nice, dense areas that still have green space, while allowing humans to live close together to gain the increasing returns that make society great. Hopefully we cut down on cars and get the fresh air as well.
How about towns, dense in the middle, with greenways out to nearby nature?
My thinking is there is more space for nature if people are a bit concentrated in one area. Hong Kong is an extreme example, over two thirds of the land is nature [0], the rest seems to be mostly high-rise skyscrapers! I think they did a good job with the small space they had to work within.
I was hoping that you weren't thinking like a giant suburb or exurb where we are in cars all the time? That can be such a drag.
If not done very carefully, that's just sprawl and bad in its own way. What we need IMO is not to move to the country so much, but back to smaller towns and cities. Some centralization of infrastructure - schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, roads and sewers etc. to connect them - still makes sense economically and ecologically. Somewhere between 50-100K or so new scaling problems always seem to appear - traffic, crime, the waste and corruption that comes with a larger bureaucracy, and so on. Big cities have historically had some advantages to outweigh those costs, but in the world of the last year or so I think more people are starting to reconsider whether that's still true.
After the city of Detroit had lost most of its population, there was a real problem with the cost of providing infrastructure and services to a single home in each multi-block area. There were proposals to concentrate those things into multiple "villages" with the space in between (other than roads) reverting to nature. Unfortunately they never got to try it because too many of those isolated-home owners refused to move. I'm not saying who was right or wrong, but it prevented the experiment from happening and I think we might all regret that some day.
Dense cities make the problems more visible and makes decentralised solutions less effective, but the problems aren’t inherent. There are plenty of well functioning cities with high population density. And there are plenty of low density urban environments that suck hard.
> I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet...
Have you ever stopped to seriously consider if this is the realistic end result of liberalism? This is a very common trend for major cities that have been under liberal control for decades (Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, etc). And yet somehow the politicians convince the population that this time around will be different.
But wouldn't it make logical sense for the general population to consider trying something different? We're talking decades of single party control (left wing liberals), and these cities are rat-pits.
I guess that's why it's so powerful that the left currently owns the mass media...they stir up that visceral hatred to the point where people forget about reality.
Republicans don’t even try and compete in major cities anymore. In fact they use them as a foil to convince their suburban and rural constituency from voting for the party that has “New York values”, etc. they literally just insult that part of the country so how could they win?
And why would a Republican do better is a question I’d ask? Their track record across the vast swaths of America they control are full of drug addicts, high rates of welfare, and crumbling towns. It really is the white ghetto. Outside the affluent suburbs the country is more or less not doing any better than the major cities.
Regardless, the Republican argument would need to change to “effective government” from their typical “no government” stance. People do want self sufficiency and they do want to be treated as individuals and not reduced to group identity. But there are certain things republicans would have to change to break through.
The republican party is only staying afloat via voter suppression, radicalization, and gerrymandering. That said they're doing a pretty good job of it. They're trying to double down on it in the South as well, plus take away even more women's rights to do what they want with their body. It's still anyone's ballgame but the left is slowly winning by sheer numbers and demographics. The R wall can't hold forever but they don't seem to be willing to change.
While I agree, the recent Texas power outage is the result of a free-market system for energy. California hasn't done well with energy either, but for different reasons. My point is that funny things happen when markets fail and when empathy-driven policy goes too far.
You’re uninformed about the situation in Texas. Electricity is regulated in Texas more of less the same way as its regulated everywhere else: regulated monopolies control the distribution grid, and power is generated in regulated markets and fed into the grid. That basic mechanism is used not only in the US, but Europe too: https://fsr.eui.eu/electricity-markets-in-the-eu/ (“Please note that while in the EU electricity markets have been deregulated, other regulatory models can be in place in other parts of the world.”). The problem in Texas wasn’t free market for energy specifically, but failure on the part of ERCOT (a quasi-regulatory body that oversees the grid) to impose appropriate reliability requirements in the face of unpredictable climate events.
My understanding is that no one provided incentives to cold harden production or keep surplus capacity on standby. p999 events like that are where markets fail because it's rare for utilities or consumers to have that time horizon, and "we're only sending power during a cold spell to customers already on the premium plan" isn't politically viable.
Your point is why “deregulated” energy systems don’t actually leave those choices completely up to the market. Regional Transmission Organizations, like ERCOT, are quasi regulatory entities that are supposed to ensure grid reliability. These entities actually engage in all sorts of central planning, and then conduct various types of auctions with precise parameters to set prices. The “deregulation” part is mainly about shifting from government regulators setting prices to having artificially constructed markets setting prices. It’s nothing like the free-for-all people are imagining.
ERCOT is a bit different in that it doesn’t use what’s called a forward capacity auction. All RTOs in the country have markets where users pay generators for instantaneous electrical production. RTOs other than ERCOT, however, also have what’s called a forward capacity market. The RTO projects how much peak power will be required three years from now, and conducts auctions to provide the required capacity at the lowest price. Then there are various mechanisms attached to that which ensure that a generator that commits to providing a certain amount of capacity actually does so when the RTO calls it in. ERCOT instead maintains a fixed reserve margin—it tries to ensure that capacity is about 13.5% higher than peak projected demand. That’s different, but it’s still not a free-for-all.
Amusingly, many people called the lack of a capacity market a positive thing. In practice it tends to prop up coal plants, because those can reliably commit to providing a particular generation capacity years in advance, unlike renewables: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/flexibility-wit....
> the recent Texas power outage is the result of a free-market system for energy
Texas was not the only area that had problems. Louisiana is regulated and had outages, people with no potable water, etc [0] Nearby states did not have available power to send via the interconnects. It was really cold for a really long time. Everyone talks about how it snowed ten years ago in Austin. I know, I was there. But do they also mention that this cold spell was the worst cold spell in 100 years?
There are many bad things that can happen in this world, we can't afford to prevent all of them. As a society we do not have unlimited money to spend, decisions need to be made, sometimes we have to muddle through. Societies have to prioritize where to spend their limited resources.
I get the feeling that there's a lot of partisan politics involved in the dialogue around things like this, always in hindsight! I don't understand the urge people have to knock down others who are doing something different. Not everyone thinks the way you or I do. The Texas power system has its pros and cons. They've been enjoying cheap power for a long time. They, along with others, struggled during this record cold. I don't understand why this needs to be a partisan issue, or what business it is of anybody outside of Texas. I'm sure they'll make adjustments and improvements to their system. They get to decide, it's their system, right?
I wouldn't say that regulation is a failed model because the power went out in Louisiana. I also don't agree that markets are to blame for a 100-year cold snap in Texas. Disasters happen.
(Note that I don't necessarily agree with the parent you were replying to. I grew up in a city like the ones mentioned, and the problems were more due to corruption, I believe. Politicians are not our friends, none of them.)
I live in New Orleans and by and large things were fine. Maybe 50K people lost power and water in the state and most of those were in BR. (Lake Charles is still recovering from the hurricanes). It was much worse here in Jan 2018.
Entergy turned over its grid control to MISO, as well as built a (huge waste of a) gas peaker plant that I will concede was used in this situation but probably wasn't needed given our connection with other states. Louisiana may be an economic colony of Texas, but please don't drag us into apologia for the national media or Texas' poor decisions.
I drew an equivalence to highlight that the problems related to the record 100 year cold weather crossed regulatory boundaries, which was the topic of discussion.
In Louisiana 2 million people lost power (42% of the state population), 800k had to boil water (17%), and 5 people died (1 of every 940k).
In Texas 4.5 million people lost power (17% of the state population), 12 million had water problems (43%), and 40 deaths as of a few days ago (1 of every 685k).
I don't think my comparing the two states to prove a point was out of bounds. The numbers show significant impact in both of them. I know Oklahama got it pretty bad, and Mexico was impacted. Cold weather kills. Water pipes were going to freeze regardless of electricity. People don't go to shelters when they should. I know the numbers are not the complete picture, but back to the original point: This was a 100 year cold spell, not a free market failure.
I'm not sure of your angle, I might be misunderstanding your comment. I didn't mean to trash Louisiana. It's understandable that this record cold would cause problems. I don't think it's fair to single Texas out, and the numbers above support that.
The power producers that did winterize couldn't run their plants for lack of gas due to wellheads and pipelines freezing [0] (Texas Railroad Commission jurisdiction) and an emergency order directing gas away from power plants (TRC again) [1]
I'm just finished reading about the people in Texas who got $10k bills. I'm wondering if these people, residential customers, knew the rate limits were increased for those 32 hours? It's not fair if they don't have a mechanism to monitor or limit the rate they're willing to pay. I wouldn't call that a complete failure of their system, but it needs to be made right. A 10k surprise bill sucks. They pushed the risk to these people, and the regulators there knew it. I don't know where the money is going. I'd try to negotiate it down. I also think it should be easier to declare bankruptcy. People are more important than companies. I'm hoping they get bailed out at some point, they are as deserving as anyone else. I'd be outraged if people don't get the tools to monitor and limit their usage rates.
I still wouldn't characterize this as a "free market failure", implying there is no room for competition, or everything needs to be the same as the rest of the country.
I paid a lot of attention to the following from the grandparent's linked texasmonthly.com article: "You essentially pay up front for peace of mind. But because neither regulators nor state lawmakers ordered anybody to pay, nothing was done." (regarding winterizing, costs to keep the grid robust, etc)
I assume that the regulators and the politicians weren't smart enough to do their part. Free markets can be great, can be better than too much regulation, but need to be tempered by the people's interests. The politicians involved failed big time. Didn't they think past their next reelection? Hopefully they make adjustments, both in their current regulations, and in the processes around reviewing and maintaining those regulations. I'm disgusted at the oversights that led to this. They had regulators who were responsible for this stuff! I'm curious how this will play out.
On a related note, it's not a free market if the customers don't know when the price increases a hundred fold or more.
So you're saying the homeless and mentally ill in San Francisco are just lazy and grifting the system? There's plenty of data available to show how naive that statement is. What would be your proposed solution?
I’m saying it attracts people who need something. You stop services to people maintaining the status of quo and invest in rehabilitating and upon failure, removing people.
The problem is (idk how many homeless you’ve spoken with in SF). Most chose to be there, you have to make it somewhere they can’t live like that.
This is a failure of policy. Other cities have solved this, SF can too.
Cut off services and have them go where? Also, how do you ban someone from a city? This is just a purely NIMBY response and not in any way realistic or helpful. You just really don't like it in your backyard and want it in someone else's backyard. I feel like your next suggestion is euthanasia.
(1) Offer rehabilitation (many homeless don't willingly take advantage of this).
(2) Regularly push them out of where they are staying with officers. If necessary, use hoses or w.e.
People will either leave because they can't stay there or they attempt to rehabilitate. This is what they do most places outside of California.
This method often leads to rehabilitation, because they don't really have a choice. Those who don't want to be rehabilitate leave and start a life the next town over, live in the woods, what have you.
It's better for everyone in a society to hold each other accountable -- be apart of the society or leave. Many homeless are drug addicts and / or mentally ill, they need help, but you can't help them (unless they want to). By holding everyone accountable, everyone will be better off.
Homelessness is an incredibly stressful situation. As the richest country on Earth, and a very rich city, we can do better than hosing/kicking out with police for people who are already in a crisis situation. The added stress and suffering doesn't seem constructive.
I agree that you can't help someone unless they want help. But there hasn't been enough help offered to say that these people don't want help. Shelters have a lot of issues like theft. It's a vicious cycle. I'm sure the vast majority of the homeless are really suffering and don't want to be homeless.
A great read based on research, w citations: https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/proven-solutions/
I agree we need to hold each other accountable. But we should also take care of each other because it could've been you. If the people who are homeless grew up the way I did and got to go to good public schools, and didn't have the stress of poverty growing up, maybe they wouldn't have fallen into drugs or developed mental illnesses. We need to give people a chance.
Leaving a town that you are familiar with must be really stressful and scary. Living in the woods seems impossible nowadays (I certainly wouldn't know how). I'm afraid that if we push the homeless out of society, they would die. And that seems very unacceptable to me.
It’s an untenable situation to have tens of thousands of people shooting up heroin, defecating openly on city streets and accosting the public — sometimes violently — while local residents foot the bill. This is a federal issue. West coasters deserve to live in cities with reasonable standards of public health and safety, and local governments are unable to solve the problem through social programs without attracting even more homelessness.
West coast lawlessness demands federal funding. Tent city occupants are for all intents and purposes refugees, and we basically need a UN-style refugee camp for them to live in.
Ugh, almost all modern cities have solved this. SF can solve this too. You force the homeless out of the city and attempt to rehabilitate where you can.
Also, this is definitely not a federal problem. At most it’s a Cali problem. This is how the US works, local jurisdictions deal with the local problem.
Force them out of cities to where exactly? It doesn't sound like you've thought this through.
What OP meant was that it will take a federal initiative, meaning something that will cover every state and local jurisdiction. If they're forced out of one locality, what's to stop the next one from moving them out of there and so on?
What the OP is probably trying to say is that TPTB should collectively push-together, no wait, thats not the word, gather? No that's not right either. Ah yes, "concentrate" the undesirables into to some sort of "camp", perhaps.
Studies have consistently shown the homeless in SF are from the city and neighboring regions. It’s not attracting homeless from elsewhere. The homelessness problem is a housing problem, plain and simple. No socialism necessary to explain it.
How does this reduce the number of homeless?
This "socialist" values maybe the reason why SF attracts so many homeless but it's not the cause of their existence.
> I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go.
> tech bros step over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year.
> Why didn't they build more houses here?
I don't think you've learned about Prop 13 yet. Ignorance is bliss here. Yes there are answers to your questions, but California is more enjoyable when you're just confused about these things.
Just replace them with land value taxes that are assessed for each block or maybe the entire neighborhood. Then split the tax bill based on the area of land owned so that you get a fixed rate per square foot.
I may as well represent a different perspective here.
I am not leaving San Francisco. It's beautiful here. I'm excited to see it get weirder. I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever. Everything about San Francisco has always been "temporary." This city is boom/bust, constantly changing. It's interesting, having a front-row seat to the ways that people and culture change over time.
Some of the most interesting, most cherished times for native San Franciscans was the 60s/70s, when crime was way higher than today, there was no real tech presence, and the art scene here was booming. It was expensive then, too. It's probably always going to be expensive to live here.
If you're here, you can probably already feel the city starting to get into the bust times, the times when the culture really starts to get shaken up and things start evolving into something new. It's not for everyone, but for a certain kind of person — it's better than anywhere else.
You probably won't agree with me, and that's okay. I don't expect, or want, everyone to. But the changes I've seen in SF recently — personally, I like them. There's so much potential.
EDIT: The level of hostility in the comments here is a little staggering. Please, readers, consider that others may have a different perspective than you. Obviously, I am not condoning any further human suffering. If that's all that you can see in my comment, consider if the cynicism in your comment may effect others.
Come on dude. People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF. We're talking about fucking needles, and human feces in the street. Stop protecting this shit by labeling it as something other than human suffering and a public health disaster.
My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media.
I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so is a target for conservative media and the problems are massively overblown. People act like the Tenderloin is the whole city, or tech people who never left soma. The city is incredibly beautiful overall.
The top comment at time of writing is complaining about taxes AND how terrible it is to see homeless and we are evil. It’s a hot take totally free of substance, short of kicking people out of the city there are no easy solutions that involve lower taxes and helping all the homeless. These people want to sound compassionate but mostly sound like they want suffering out of their eyesight.
Downtown SF has emptied out because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know if it will last but it’s so dumb to act like people left for any other reason than a pandemic making city living awful. There’s a good chance it will bounce back.
Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of. The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city. And that jealousy combined with hatred of democrats means people will massively exaggerate problems.
Again, I highly recommend visiting any other neighborhood besides soma or the tenderloin.
For all the places I have worked in and visited through my life, including poor countries in Africa, Europe, Russia, and places as extreme as Afghanistan, the only place I have ever seen someone openly defecate in the street is San Francisco. And I've seen it many times in San Francisco.
It's not overblown. Your reference points have been distorted. It's not normal. People don't do that in other cities.
...This actually happens in the downtown of literally every major metro in the US because the US is terrible at dealing with the underlying issues that lead to this sort of thing as a whole.
Just because you haven't exposed yourself to it nor seen about it in disgusting sensationalist shitshow that is media in the US doesn't mean it isn't happening.
I’ve seen it in Vietnam, India, and heard about seeing it in Brazil from friends. I’m sure it’s more common than you think, we just have a very embolden and large homeless population with not enough public toilets and way too many substance abuse / mental health issues.
I was born and raised in Brazil where I lived until 25 in a major city with no shortage of poverty and inequality. I have never seen or heard reports of people defecating on the street. Though at least in the northeast it’s common for men to urinate.
I had a friend living in Rio, who told me of a woman who did this before getting into her car. Now I’m not saying it’s common, but it isn’t like SF is the only place in the world where it’s happening.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m from San Francisco and I’ve never seen anyone do this either. But clearly it happens.
I was born in and grew up in SF. I still go once in awhile. SF got a lot worse.
I didn’t grow up with tents surrounding City Hall nor tents lining the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.
Go look at Polk Street in Nob Hill. Go look at Van Ness. Go look at the Castro. Those aren’t SOMA or the Tenderloin. I saw a smashed bus shelter right off Van Ness. I saw graffiti and garbage on the sidewalk in Nob Hill. There are multiple tents pitched right off the freeway off ramp in the Castro.
The problem of SF is not affordability. It is that its policies make it a honeypot for homeless. These people are in no shape at all to work. Think mental issues, drug abuse, etc...
These issues are societal and not limited to SF. Furthermore, SF’s policies don’t seem to be helping at all.
If you want to contain it, turn Salesforce tower into a homeless shelter and ban tents on sidewalks. Establish work programs to clean up street. Perhaps some of the people will turn around their lives.
The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.
Many towns on the Peninsula are not cool with homeless pitching tents on sidewalks. They get their tents taken down and are directed to homeless shelters.
SF seems ok with it, so all the homeless go there and pitch tents. Homeless elsewhere hear about this and head off to SF. SF politicians run on leftist agendas and then pour money into this endless pit.
> The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.
Haha absolutely wrong. While not as bad as SF, homeless issues everywhere else in the Bay have also gotten much worse. Mountain View, San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, everywhere.
Nope. It seems better in Belmont, San Carlos, Burlingame, San Mateo, and Millbrae. Don’t notice the homeless hanging around CalTrain stops anymore. There used to be a few tents pitched along the tracks upper Peninsula. I don’t see those anymore. There is zero discussion of tents in social media mid Peninsula. Discussion is only focused on providing food and isolated cases of people losing jobs.
It may be worse in Mountain View or San Jose, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem worse in Fremont, at least the parts that I go to. Also, my relatives and friends who live there aren’t complaining. My friends who lived in SF were complaining loudly before they moved out.
I quoted a specific line of yours that purported the rest of the Bay's homeless situation was improving, to the detriment of SF. Linking videos of increasing homeless in SF tells us nothing about the rest of the Bay's situation.
I don't need to "search" youtube videos of the rest of the Bay to get a more accurate picture. I guess I can't speak for that tiny population-slice of the peninsula you did mention, but for the rest I'm all over the rest of the Bay's towns constantly and saying homeless populations "have disappeared from their sidewalks" is quite the overstatement.
You also probably shouldn't scatter your replies across many different nested comments elsewhere?
The paragraph specified the Peninsula. None of the cities you mentioned are even on the Peninsula. San Jose, Fremont, Mountain View, Oakland. None of them are in the Peninsula.
You may be right about those cities that you mentioned but my statement did not apply to them. I don’t know enough about them. I have been to Oakland recently. It’s bad. I have also been to Fremont and Milpitas. The parts I have been to don’t look worse. But who knows.
I don’t know how to gauge the Bay as a whole. That encompasses a very large region that I don’t think many have a good grasp of. The areas you mention don’t even make up half the Bay Area in area yet you are so willing to denigrate what I saw.
You are right, I should have linked to videos of the other cities. I can’t find any for several of the cities on the Peninsula. I did find two on San Jose. One says that it is bad in a specific area and the other is a protest against sweeps of that area by the police.
Sure I could've focused on explicitly the Peninsula like you originally mentioned, but 75% of the Peninsula is living in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, not the 4 adjacent tiny towns you mentioned + San Mateo.
I also consider Mountain View on south to be part of the South Bay but Wikipedia doesn’t. Most SF Bay natives also draw the line the way I draw it but it doesn’t matter much.
The distinction people I know made is how far south or north people were willing to commute. So commuting from Palo Alto or Mountain View to SF was considered a really long commute. Commuting from Sunnyvale was considered untenable long term.
Most recent SF residents seem to have an additional line around SF and consider anything outside SF far. Oh well.
> The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city.
Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I moved to central FL a couple years ago and I tend to browse jobs from time to time just to see whats around me, so while I don't live in Miami, specifically, I have looked around. Looking at Florida is weird, compared to some other places I've been, the market in FL seems rather disappointing, in both the quality and variety of tech jobs in the state. I feel like career wise, it'd be better off to go back to GA or NC. Culturally Miami seems past it's prime as well. You never really here much about or here about people talking wanting to move there like you do most of the other cosmopolitan US cities or even cities in the Midwest and South. I'll give south FL one thing though, the area sparked a great underground rap scene in the 2010s.
Yeah I don't really get what's happening with Florida either. The state has more population than New York yet is beaten out in the tech sector by what would normally be seen as hill-billy fly-over states. Not even the space coast has a lot going on, though I guess the market for space-stable software is kinda limited.
At least housing is cheap enough you can stumble into a 3b2b with a pool and a 20 minute commute to the city on a 80k salary
Miami has had a nice cultural revolution in the last 10 years or so. A lot more art and culture than before and tons of things to do besides partying on South Beach. Many areas of Miami feel more like SF in LA than Trump country.
>Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? How the fuck can you brag about incompetence? Seriously. This isn't magic. All you have to do is absolutely nothing to achieve this outcome. It's basically the opposite of prosperity. Vancouver is also suffering from this "success". Berlin too. Are they examples of cities to look up to? Hell no.
People are not jealous of your city taking jobs hostage and extorting people who want to live there. After all, the pandemic ruined your cities' ability to take jobs hostage. That's why people are leaving.
When I think of SF I think of hundreds of thousands of people who failed to make it because of gate keeping.
Given that they're spending 60k/yr per tent and 100k/yr per hotel room to kick the homeless can down the road, which is about 5 and 8 times what I spend on my own housing per year, it does seem like there are easy, better, cheaper solutions, actually --- give them apartments. That might require building some. I hear SF residents are against that idea though.
> I'm excited to see it get weirder ... personally, I like [it]
I think the problem is that the 'weirdness' is more like 'human suffering'. People treat it like a charming part of the experience for their benefit... but like it's real people suffering.
If you’re imagining crime and homelessness, that’s not exactly what I mean by “weirdness” – those are problems that San Francisco needs to fix... and will probably always need to fix.
I mean Noone here is complaining about about having too many quirky stores. They are complaining about crime and homelessness. I don't think you're perspective is that different from them on what makes the city good,you just don't care as much about the bad.
SF's homeless problem is the US's homeless problem. Talk to people camping on the sidewalk and each one will tell you a different story, but with common themes: horrible home situation in a different state, crime -> prison -> loss of work opportunity, depression & drug abuse. These are suffering people that the American People have decided to let suffer. Yes, SF has enough money to get them all off the streets and into housing and only does that for half of them. But SF doesn't deserve all the blame.
I certainly never said that homelessness is “just life.” I’m just realistic. San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent, and it’s our responsibility as San Franciscans to help alleviate it as much as possible.
None of this has to do with my original point about San Francisco’s recent changes, which I have personally experienced as having a much higher density of artists.
> San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent
But why?
Other cities don't. For example Liechtenstein has literally no homeless people in the entire country. They had to close their last homeless shelter... because it was empty.
Many other global cities have single-digit homeless per 100k population. Why does San Francisco have literally ten thousand homeless people and why are the numbers still growing?
"will probably always have this problem" is bat-shit insane.
As a country we've decided that the suitable response to children regularly being mass murdered in schools is to train children to expect being mass murdered in school. A similar abandonment on the subject of homeless is hardly surprising.
To a certain extent, housing is a statewide problem (prop 13) which the city has limited power to address. To another extent, the lack of a National affordable healthcare program and support for people in duress amplifies the problem even further.
The city has also taken a more humane approach to dealing with the homeless rather than incarcerating or throwing them elsewhere. Most of the homeless suffer from drug/alcohol related issues and the city has tried different approaches to solving this problem.
Overall, it’s a confluence of many problems that makes it very difficult to “solve” the homelessness problem. Comparing to another city with different circumstances isn’t really helpful; they’re not facing the same situation.
In their entire country of 38k people, which has the second highest GDP per capita in the world. There are a lot of comparisons one could make here, but this is not the strongest one.
One of the most strangely written cope pieces I've seen pro-SF so far. San Francisco has never been less exciting.
Sure, it'll remain the Enterprise SaaS capital of the world for a while, but all the most exciting and interesting people have higher expectations than never-ending battles with NIMBYs and deranged city councils.
It's been feeling like time for a change for years now. I'm glad to see it happening.
I’ve not lived here for too long but I agree with your sentiment. It’s a wonderful city and I’ve met wonderful people and have had great experiences so far. No city is perfect and to the contrary of what most people complain about, I am happy that this city has a big homeless budget and that my tax dollars are being used to provide them some kind of relief, that the city Government is not prosecuting an already unfortunate class of people for doing exactly what any one of us put in such terrible circumstances would be coerced into doing.
>I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever.
If you were to ask the local home owners they want it to stay the same forever. In fact, the city isn't changing at all, it's the people that are changing.
SF needs to get the message fast that there are serious issues there that need to be fixed. Money is not going to fix a lot of these issues, policy changes will. Coming from someone who left for Colorado.
I don't think San Francisco will ever be Detroit. The geography constrained SF from physically expanding to the point where it can't sustain itself, unlike Detroit.
I think more likely is hitting some low point, and then a crackdown/reversal of the politics. I think a more apt analogy is SF now is like NYC in the 80s, and the 90s cleanup is coming sooner or later.
Isn’t SF zoning and city laws much more NIMBY and less objectively progressive than the cities reputation?
I thought that’s why it’s so dirty and full of obvious problems like petty crime and homelessness. A local political system disconnected from solving the IRL problems.
You’re right though. The solution to SF is actual liberalism of laws around the fun stuff and help for those in need to get them out of the cycle of criminality by being more reasonable with them (shelters and safe injection sites with opiate programs so they don’t have to steal and destroy i property in order to live).
I could see the latter happening like it is here in Canada (there’s always that homeless/career criminal niche everywhere) although it seems like 10x higher out on the west coast and given the tax rate as it is already super high idk if they have the appetite to do the right thing and cut other useless stuff to offset it.
For better or for worse, accurate or inaccurate, there were two lessons pretty universally drawn from Detroit: (1) White flight is very, very bad news, and (2) Heavy unionization makes factories uncompetitive.
Especially (2) -- again, I'm not saying whether this is the right or wrong conclusion -- weighs heavily on the states that picked up auto manufacturing that fled Detroit. Obviously there are contrarian takes, but these have very wide mindshare, and I don't think it's true that "everyone will draw different conclusions".
I'm not sure factories closing down in the Bay Area is a big issue as there aren't a lot. The bigger issue is upper middle class and upper class people and their taxes leaving. On the other hand, the area generally (if not necessarily just SF proper) has a lot of attractions that Detroit never had. So it's reasonable to assume that housing prices could drop to a more sustainable level. Of course, one implication is that municipalities would probably have to operate on lower budgets than they do today.
In general, SF and Bay Area are not necessarily the same story. Plenty may choose to live in South Bay especially if prices drop but not in the city.
Over-dependency on a single industry, unwillingness to diversify, and an arrogant assumption that the same work could never be done elsewhere. Add in highways, commuting, and an infrastructure maintenance death spiral as domestic car production lost its major advantages. Rising crime added to the death spiral, as people who could moved out and the general deprivation of Detroit grew.
Many of the suburbs developed their own economies, which further encouraged people to move there instead of Detroit proper.
Lots of racism played its part in various ways. Lots of room to debate the precise degree, though the debate is probably not helpful at this point.
These days the high taxes (property and income) and auto insurance rates are big problems.
Only a few of these really apply to SF. Though the arrogance of assuming the good times will roll on forever seems accurate.
Only to the extent that San Francisco is over-dependent on tourism. "Tech" is both not really a single industry in the way that auto mfg is and far less dominant than one might guess.
Though if you can convince me that Salesforce and Autodesk are meaningfully in the same industry as Spring and LendingClub, I'm all ears.
You're absolutely right! The companies I mentioned do hire many people with similar skills.
Do you think it's possible that this might not be quite the same as being in the same market and thus being a direct commercial competitor for a company's offerings? Otherwise every company is in the Human Resources and Accounting industries. Perhaps the companies in question are not in commercial competition with one another, and only competing for a certain set of skilled technicians? Do you think the point imtringued made about downstream suppliers might be relevant?
Again, you're completely right. There genuinely is a lot of overlap in titles and skills sought! It just might perhaps be possible that this is not quite the same as all companies concerned being in the same industry. Or perhaps I am wildly wrong! Can you help me with where I might have erred?
The question of how one chooses to define an industry quite aside, the degree to which San Francisco's employment depends on "tech" is easy to overstate. Based on news and this website, you would think it was a third to a half of SF jobs. While an easy and completely understandable conclusion to draw, this would be a dramatic overstatement.
Detroit's problem was not that the companies there were direct competitors, it was that all of them were producing automobiles. When American automobile production moved elsewhere and took a large number of well-paying jobs with it, the bottom fell out of the city's economy.
What do you expect to happen to San Francisco if it loses its "tech mecca" status? Will the financial sector or the tourism sector supply enough high-paying jobs to make up the difference, or will the money drying up cascade down through the service industries?
Detroit's problem was that automotive production was and is a single sector. This is not true of "tech", as shown by a random sampling of companies being in wildly different economic sectors.
I hope this is better! Thank you for the chance to improve my communications skills. Have a nice day.
> I hope this is better! Thank you for the chance to improve my communications skills. Have a nice day.
Unrelated, but I've always found it interesting how people try to avoid appearing like they're actually invested in the conversation they're having and the effect the results have on them.
"I'm not here to exchange ideas and make my understanding of the world better, no, I'm just here to improve my communication skills and I want you to know that!"
I understand the need for self-preservation, but going to this length of lying to yourself and observers to defend your ego is amusing in my opinion.
I use it to place the blame of someone refusing or failing to understand on myself. The goal is not to signal a lack of investment, but to give someone a way to admit to being wrong without actually having to admit to anything. It sometimes helps remove a person's ego as an obstacle.
It's the difference between "I failed to be understandable" and "You failed to understand". With the former, they can come back and say that since I've clarified so helpfully, they agree with me without impugning their previous position. The latter allows no such latitude.
Tech is not a single sector, but it is a single method of doing things. In the same sense that factories exist in more than a single sector, but it largely disappeared at the same time with offshoring.
If, hypothetically, all the issues with having development teams cheap parts of the world went away, that would impact almost all of tech. It hasn't happened yet, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
Honestly, that would be amazing. It would enable a golden age of technological development. I think it's just a bit more far-fetched a near-term future than a single economic sector leaving a particular area, and not really directly comparable to Detroit's story.
Car manufacturing needs lots of downstream suppliers that usually have expertise in nothing but automotive parts. The end result is cars and nothing else.
You can build tech for car manufacturers, you can build tech for taxi companies, you can build tech for restaurants, you can build tech for any industry.
According to this talk [0] the reason is that the newly established car industry encouraged a massively unsustainable development pattern that eventually led to the bankruptcy of the city and since its the first city to be built with this pattern it was also the first to fail. Lots of other cities are suffering the same fate. New low density development at the edge of town at the expense of the self sustaining downtown core and then at some point the maintenance costs exceed the tax income and you get a city wide decline.
That's a very optimistic point of view on the ability of people to learn from examples. No matter how hard SF fails, there will be lots of people going around and telling how it have failed because of not building enough social housing for the poor, not having high enough taxes, and allowing rich to escape after robbing the city dry. Just like there are people saying that communist countries fail because of US sanctions.
Interesting to notice the title for the report vs. the title the LA Times headline writers selected.
Second, much of the data is being reported as Year over year deltas and ratios of %, which is mathematically accurate but hard to interpret. A increase of over 900% in people leaving S.F. sounds pretty spectacular, but the same metric has Alameda at over 400%, and LA is over 130%
I left SF 8 months ago after renting a small room for 5 years at ~$2k/month with housemates. By moving ~150 miles away I was able to buy my first house, ~2100 sqft on 4 acres (!) for ~$600,000. Any thoughts on what to do when the pandemic ends and employers make us come back to the Bay Area office?
I really do love San Francisco, it's so naturally beautiful, the hills give perspectives of communities, so many neighborhoods and main streets, so much stimulation, I learned about deep learning from housemates there in 2015 and was able to make a living out of it that I probably wouldn't have been able to elsewhere. Wish I listened to my other housemates espousing bitcoin and the original ethereum ico...
I made $200k salary last year and yet have no prospect for ownership of a nice home anywhere in the Bay Area, let alone San Francisco, and I'm one of the lucky ones. Even the shitty houses where I grew up near Compton, CA are asking more than half a mil now. Not sure how this all ends...
As someone it tech who has spent the last two decades or so thumbing my nose at SF/bay from the East Coast, making bold predictions that the entire house of cards paying 400k for talent you could get for half that or less on the East Coast... Now that it's happened/happening I am not happy about it at all. Having wages collapse there is going to put a drag on the rest of the market across the country. I've spent a lot of time sneering at SF tech-scene from across the country, but I'm cheering for it now.
I think you’re right to be worried. The piercing of the Bay Area reality distortion zone, combined with the unprecedented embrace of remote teams, may well mean that for the vast majority of tech workers their value will be judged against someone also very good who is willing to work for considerably less money.
Homelessness issue is a joke to the city. Transportation was horrible. The non-tourist parts of town were a toilet for people (way more than you'd even think, without seeing it). I am a younger white guy who doesn't necessarily look timid, and even then I've been threatened in the BART by drunk dudes on multiple occasions.
It's expensive. It's politics 24/7. It's crowded (not just bustling, but more as though you took a large city and squeezed it into a small city).
I love SF but they stole shit from my car, ran over my motorcycle, and then stole my motorcycle when I fixed it. Like, dude, I'll be back eventually because it has great geography and I have lots of friends I adore there.
But Jesus, man, I need a break. This is too much for so little time.
We left the Bay Area to be closer to family. It was going to happen at some point, but the pandemic just accelerated the move. The Bay Area is still my favorite place though, so ironically I’m able to save up faster to buy a house there (for retirement) by not living there currently, assuming remote incomes don’t drop drastically after the pandemic.
Anecdotally, at our apartment complex in Asheville, there are three cars with California license plates right next to mine, so at least some people had the same idea as us with regard to where to move.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for about ten years and I’ve never been more excited about the future of this city. We have an incredible opportunity to build a city that works for everyone and not just a glorified dorm room complex for young tech workers. The next few years are looking very good!
Hats off to your optimism, but having lived in SF it looks the govt has only gotten more dysfunctional. It was never about “building a city that works for everyone” and good luck on changing that.
There is no lack of civic participation in SF. That’s why it’s the way it is today. It’s community organizations like Calle 24 who don’t want tech folks and don’t want new housing. They run the city.
Exactly. The worst thing for SF is for all the new transplants to not be there for the city, but rather for the money while thumbing their nose at the city. They will invest zero into it, but displace those who contribute to culture in their wake.
No offense but this comes across as a little naive. If you go visit the parts of SF that people don’t talk about, you pretty quickly realize the wealthy (tech folks included) are a very small slice of the city and live in their own bubble of trendy restaurants and jaunts out to Tahoe.
Most people are lower or middle class families struggling to get by and even if they didn’t “love” SF they don’t have a lot of options when it comes to leaving.
Are you betting on "boomers" dying? The worst people are those who own their house and insist that things shouldn't change, ever. They will not leave until they die. They can have their house. All they have to accept is that their neighborhood will change slowly, because all neighborhoods change.
There is no way to make the city work for everyone. The city has so many constraints on it, there is no way for everyone to be happy.
For one, it's incredibly geographically constrained. Because it's constrained, housing supply is restricted, which drives prices up enormously and displaces the majority of the population. If you open up housing development, and high-rises start shooting up everywhere, the identity of the city diminishes, and it will lose a good deal of the character that most find appealing about it. Maintain development restrictions, however, and you get people complaining about the NIMBYism and extremely high prices.
In regards to the homeless, how do you resolve that? I mean, if your solution is to provide them with housing in one of the most geographically constrained and most expensive places on the planet, well then you're going to contribute to the first problem. If you're going to move them somewhere else, you'll ease up on the housing constraint issues, but upset the homeless population, and a good deal of people who thought that the homeless were perfectly entitled to live in the middle of most expensive city in the country.
What about the culture? The artistic community that had a larger presence in the city a few decades ago absolutely hates the influx of tech workers. Tech has taken root as a primary identity of the city. Does the city work for everybody when the tech workers continue to displace artists, or the artists prevent the tech workers for moving in?
In what way are you going to come up with solutions that "work for everybody?"
I don’t know, but as I am both an artist and a tech worker, I have a large stake in whatever comes next, and I know that the future belongs to the people who show up for it.
Area is priced highly, jobs can be done from anywhere else in the world, so it is natural regardless of politics and all the other crap that people migrate to cheaper areas where they feel they can live out of. The SF/SV bubble is leaking out and pressure is being let out to the rest of the world mostly US. Obviously, SF isn't the only high priced area in the world that is leaking out.
With lowered rent prices, this should help alleviate economics on lower paid people. Who's to say these areas won't go sky high again though.
Those who left SF Bay Area, do you regret it? Why or why not?
I'm currently thinking about moving to a different state as it makes sense financially, but I have an attachment with the Bay Area and what it offers (especially as an immigrant), so I'm hesitant to move. I'm interested to hear experiences of people who recently left.
I moved to Reno short term once covid hit and have zero regrets. Saving 1k a month in taxes alone. One thing I really appreciate is not having to wait in line for everything e.g. lunch, gas at Costco, post office, car service etc.
I never understood why companies paid the living costs of SF instead of locating in the Midwest or smaller cities. Someone told me it’s because SF is where all the talent goes so it would be unwise to locate elsewhere.
Maybe COVID has revealed that geography is not as important to success as people believed.
1. Closeness to the Stanford university ecosystem which promoted tech. Berkeley isn't too far away physically, though it may not be very near ideologically. Talent helps.
2. Matthew Effect: The (talent-)rich (cities) get richer.
3. Weather. I have lived at some point in the midwest. Shovelling snow in a morning storm so that you can get in the car to go to office is not something I'd want to do again. Maybe Denver has mild enough weather to be considered a replacement. On the other hand, Colorado is a beautiful place and it'd be sad to see it overrun by large crowds of morning commuters. Austin is a viable alternative, Texas school boards notwithstanding.
4. Covid is not a long-term trend. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a physical meeting, or a discussion over coffee.
While I think all that's true, tons of people manage to deal with states with snow including metros with major university systems. It's not a deal-breaker for most. Furthermore, there are lots of ways people can get together and collaborate. I even live near a local office that I rarely go into. I mostly meet people when traveling.
i live in denver. winters are getting warmer and drier but the summers lately have been very very hot and wayyy too much smoke from fires. still amazing weather though!
you're right on the traffic it's always sucked but not as bad as like LA of course.
with the population growth it goes right back into highways.. always building/expanding ;(
i feel like in theory we should be super bike/walk friendly; if Minneapolis can build bike highways that are used in the dead of winter we should be able too. but we don't. my neighbors prioritize and fight politically for street parking. you can't even see into intersections because they let cars park right up to the edge. they're trying to make a street near me a bike corridor - put in fake roundabouts - but it's not a protected lane and they still have parking on the street ffs.
the light rail should have been more promising too. we do have good buses though and the train to airport is nice. maybe can someday finish the boulder extension.
we're building a ton of condos in the center of denver so i really hope we get more pedestrian first voters.
And also please let's keep outdoor dining/drinking post COVID. take back the streets from cars!
I don't drive and live purposefully where i can walk or uber. it's great unless you go to the mounatins a lot.
i supported a mayoral candidate who really wanted to restore the street cars - it makes a ton of sense would love to see it return on a few of the major streets like colfax downtown to CU hospital.
I'm not sure about 4. in a corporate setting. In academia, maybe, but in corporate physical meetings the person with the greatest reality distortion field uses them to his/her way.
Could you clarify more on the ideological differences between Stanford and Berkeley? Also other universities. I had no idea that something like that even exists. Are they (also) different on the political spectrum or in some other area?
People closer to the ground can comment better. But to summarize, tenure decisions in Stanford reputedly take into account whether you are involved in startups etc. Berkeley is more traditionally academic, as far as I understand.
As for the political spectrum, Berkeley is left-liberal. I am not sure about Stanford. It is also somewhat liberal, even though conservative/libertarian think-tanks like the Hoover institution are based on the Stanford campus.
At around 2000 - 2010 San Francisco had the reputation of being an amazing city. It wasn't a tech hub back then but it was a very cultural city with a lot of diversity, art and amazing views. A lot of people just wanted to live there, including tech workers. One my friends worked at google and lived in SF because she told me she was so "enamored" by the city.
In fact that's why those google shuttles exist. Because back then tons and tons of people loved the city so much that they wanted to live in SF while working in Mountain View.
When tech started rising more and more, tech workers started moving into SF turning it into the tech hub that it is today. This upped property values which in turn drove a lot of junkies and homeless people out of the condemned properties as those properties were getting repurposed to take advantage of the growing market.
That's why you see shit on the streets and needles everywhere. Rising property values essentially took what was happening behind closed doors and put it in the middle of the street. Everybody applauds all the social programs offered to the needy by SF until it they see it up close and personal.
So really there's two main root causes for why SF is the shit hole it is today:
1. Excessive amount of tech workers.
2. Drug availability.
The Tech worker thing is new. The Drug problem is old, although I'm not sure how much the recent opioid epidemic contributes to that.
Anyway this seemed like a tangent but to address your point: Companies wanted to move to SF because the tech workers WANTED to live there. The companies relocated based off the location of talent.
The situation today is the end result of a feedback loop produced by Tech companies and Tech workers from 2010 to now. Tech workers move to SF, so companies follow. This causes more workers to follow the companies.
You'll see this correlation everywhere. If companies don't want to be in a certain city, for sure there's an amount of skilled workers who don't want to be there either.
Everywhere is. There's a shortage of homes (reduced build the past decade due to surplus at the time), and the rock bottom mortgage prices + remote work requiring more space means a lot of people looking to buy. High demand + low supply = rising prices.
There are more people leaving California each year than being born in it. The study in the article focuses on movement between 2019-20. I’m not sure if they’re addressing the question the right way, as 2020 was a pretty unusual year and this has been going on for quite some time.
I haven't been to SF, but if it's the same as Downtown east side in Vancouver, it's understandable, it's been taken over by the homeless.
I'm from a 3rd world country and the situation is even below my standards.
I don't understand the framing of the article when they say
> The number of people leaving California typically tracks with the amount entering the state. But the findings show that wasn’t the case in the fourth quarter of 2020, when 267,000 people left the state and only 128,000 entered.
So that's 130k people leaving for one year (not a quarter like the way it's phrased, I've looked up the statistics and 130k a year makes more sense). And the negative growth of the state's population began before the pandemic. I'm failing to see how losing 0.3% of your population is not the beginning of an exodus?
> I'm failing to see how losing 0.3% of your population is not the beginning of an exodus?
It could be the beginning of an exodus, but it is not strong evidence that an exodus will follow. If done for affordability reasons, it reduces demand a bit to create a new equilibrium with supply.
Anyways, I’m not clear why anyone with a background in tech would be confident that a 0.3% drop was evidence that a huge drop was just right around the corner.
You would not be wrong if that was the first year. But it follows a multiple years long trend. The only reason the population of California kept increasing was because births were offsetting the net lost of migration until 2018.
More people are leaving California currently than coming to it. Perhaps that isn't a biblical level exodus quite yet, but it's coming with time. Just be patient. Rome didn't fall in a day.
In some sense, it doesn't matter whether population goes up or down, we should not have a policy that population must always go up. But for CA the problem is that wealthier people are leaving while poorer people are moving in. This is exarcebated by a policy of high income taxes and low real estate taxes -- real estate is much less mobile than people. And this is further exarcerbated by a policy of very progressive income taxes, which makes the state budget sensitive to a small number of wealthier households leaving.
California still was at positive population increase before the pandemic because of foreign immigration. Also, Texas had more people than California just back in 1940, it isn’t weird that it’s huge growth over the last 80 years has come to an end.
Nope. Look at New York. Anyways, if you want to see the reality, do a Google for “California population”, it will include Florida and Texas in a graph that goes back to 1920.
And...where is NYC today? Definitely not a desolate bankrupt city with falling property values.
Also, San Francisco and the Bay Area are definitely not immune to the boom-bust cycle, there have been busts before and there will be busts again, just like any other boom towns.
You wish, maybe? Anyways, conservatives need places like NYC and California to fail to validate their ideologies, that they keep thriving and booming must be incredibly frustrating to them.
Tl;dr: not the usual Californians-leave-in-droves-for-redder-pastures story. Exodus from SF city has drastically increased, but is mostly still within California, or even within the Bay Area economic area. It has also increased relatively more towards the Sierra Nevada area.
I like SF where it is. Close enough that I can take the bus there but far enough that I don't have to have a conversation about UFOs with a bum unless I choose to.
I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.
The usual retort to this is “what will you do without California’s economic engine?” And that’s a fair point—America without California will be less wealthy. But that will be fine; and in fact probably better. Think about it. People reminisce about the 1950s and 1960s as the good times. What did America look like back then? It looked a lot more like Iowa. Poorer than California on average, but economically flat with a low ceiling (few high income people) and a high floor (few really poor people). There are few upper middle class people (very little knowledge industry jobs) and consequently very little of the ecosystem that upper middle class people bring with them (housing, retail, restaurants, etc., that are unaffordable to normal people). Upper middle class people are what drive malaise among the rest of the population.
People in places like San Francisco, Portland, etc., complain about the tech industry people moving in. And the response of tech industry people is “hey, we’re not billionaire, we’re working stiffs like everyone else.” Jeff Bezos might have oodles of money, but it’s just on paper. He’s not buying enough houses to move the market prices. It’s Amazon engineers that are buying houses with their high salaries in sufficient numbers to drive up property prices. And as a result, people can’t afford to live and raise kids where they grew up. And that imposes devastating costs on middle class people. For middle class people for whom child care is a major expense, being able to drop the kids off at their grandparents regularly is a huge boon economically and socially. (Remember, the median American adult lives less than 18 miles from their mom.) Then comes all the other stuff. The corner burger joint is replaced by a fancy one that charges $18 for a cheeseburger. The diner where you can get a $1.00 coffee is replaced by a fancy coffee that charges $5.00 for a coffee. Conveniences and frivolities become far more expensive. The local gymnastics studio where you can send your kid twice a week to get her out of your hair doubles it’s prices. Etc. Jeff Bezos, by contrast, has no impact on any of that.
I think the natives complaining about the influx of high income professionals actually perceive the reality correctly. Most of them aren’t qualified for high paying jobs at Google and Facebook anyway. These industries moving in won’t help them in that regard. It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.
WA and OR yes, but only the part west of Cascades. The parts of these states east of Cascades are totally unlike the ones west of them. For Oregon, actually, Portland area is totally unlike the rest of Oregon culturally, so southern Oregon would also probably prefer to stay with the Union instead of leaving along CA and western WA.
So your solution is not to kick the wealthy out of the union, but to kick California out of the union, simply because it has a large population of wealthy people?
The problem isn’t the wealthy people per se. The problem is industries like tech that generate highly paid upper middle class jobs that most people aren’t qualified for (and realistically will never be qualified for), as opposed to a larger number of middle class jobs that most people can be qualified for.
There is a reason people pine for coal and oil jobs. Head out to east or west Texas sometime. Lots of prosperity for middle class people through skilled, but not college required, jobs that most people can learn. But few upper middle class knowledge workers to drive up prices. The result is much more palpable middle class prosperity than places that are much richer on paper, like the Bay Area. (Also far less racial segregation, for exactly the same reason.)
> The problem isn’t the wealthy people per se. The problem is industries like tech that generate highly paid upper middle class jobs that most people aren’t qualified for (and realistically will never be qualified for), as opposed to a larger number of middle class jobs that most people can be qualified for.
You talk as if that is a problem. If you are surrounded by rich customers you also get to charge more for your low skill job. The problem is that there isn't enough housing for both high skill and low skill workers.
A corollary to my thesis is that local inequality is what drives resentment among the middle class. Finance is peculiarly concentrated in NYC. It’s not like JP Morgan has an office in Portland where it hires investment bankers who drive up housing prices.
>I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.
I agree about one thing. California actively drives economic inequality.
Here's my theory about the entire economy of the US transforming since 2000.
Thanks to globalization manufacturing jobs went to China and other countries. This caused a decline in rural communities where a handful of companies were exporting manufactured goods to the rest of the US and some of them exported to foreign countries. However, sales within USA were the primary driver of revenue. The internet makes centralization easier. This means you can set up a headquarter anywhere and reach the rest of the USA. Similar events happened with industries starting to consolidate. Think of Walmart eating local companies. Centralization shifts profits to corporate headquarters. More money is leaving the local town than is coming in. This causes a death spiral, especially when the city has over leveraged itself on infrastructure which is a common problem for small towns. The new winners are the headquarter cities. Lots of money is leaving from small places and entering big places. Big cities have more headquarters so they are benefiting massively. This drives urbanism a shift from rural places to urban places.
Automation increases productivity at the expense of obsoleting skills. This causes a shift to low skill jobs of which there aren't many as the manufacturing jobs have moved to China and the high skilled jobs moved to cities. So now the country is suffering from a labor surplus. Low skill labor sees immigrants as competition. So the cycle of right wing activism starts.
The chasm between skilled and unskilled is now so great that the best answer is to retrain people. America has collectively decided that employers do not have to train their employees. Instead everyone gets access to student loans and must fund their own education through future income. In principle this is okay if you make sure people don't over leverage themselves on a degree that cannot bring in the required income, something that is very common when there is a low skill labor glut. Okay, but the loan program enabled millions of students to enroll, surely a two digit percentage of them did get a high skill job in the end? This is where there story starts involving California.
California is massively benefiting from urbanization, globalization and automation. It's the ultimate place to go after your got your fancy STEM degree. The desire to prevent new housing and discourage people from coming to California is absolutely egoistical from this perspective. SF is supposed to be an economic power house for millions of people who are forced to leave their hometown because of economic decline. Yes, they will be rich, but only after they spent years working in SF. From that perspective California is sabotaging the success of the entirety of the US by running a dysfunctional state.
>It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.
Land is fixed, housing isn't. You can always build more.
I agree with some of your points, but I think you overlook that being a "headquarter state" actually kind of sucks for your average person. The rise in incomes for typical people don't come close to offsetting the inflation that results from the large influx of high-income knowledge workers. All my wife's friends who attended the University of Iowa with her and stayed in state own houses and are getting on with their lives in their mid 30s. That's a wild fantasy in D.C. or NYC or SF. California's net domestic outmigration is over 5 per 1,000 (more people leaving than coming in). That's the inverse of places like Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, etc. Middle class people are running away from the headquarters states.
You obviously don't want to go full Detroit and completely lose your local industries. But more of the U.S. becoming like California would actually be bad too.
If I read it correctly, California state constitution amendments are from popular vote in the state - the California legislature can only put them on the ballot to be voted on (and then, its a 2/3 vote there - easier to get 8% of the previous total vote to petition).
The Supreme Court can't rule against it because it is constitutional because it is the constitution.
> In 1992, a legal challenge (Nordlinger v. Hahn) was considered by the United States Supreme Court, which subsequently ruled 8–1 that Proposition 13 was constitutional.
The die-hard San Franciscan is probably saying "Good!" They don't want anyone living there that's above average, is able to earn a living, or doesn't want to poop on the sidewalk.
But good luck running a city when 100% of your population is incapable of contributing more than they take.
It's ok, they're going to relocate and keep pushing the same culture with their votes, slowly destroying the next place.
I left 8 years ago, couldn't have been happier. SF is beautiful, but the lack of political diversity (ironic for a city so outspoken on diversity) is what pushes these crazy ideas and policies that will ultimately end up with this outcome.
